Modeling cities.

Guangzhou is undergoing a rapid social development and a major spatial transformation. During this process, social housing policy gradually becomes one of the main drivers for spatial resource distribution and population flows across the city area. As a pilot city, Guangzhou’s intensive construction of social housing blocks was designed to address the living conditions of substantial numbers of local families in urban areas. The development of social housing can be traced back to 1994, have experienced three waves of constructions. Despite the substantial benefits, there also appear to be certain unintended consequences which may affect living conditions and may imply a further lack of sociospatial resources. As such, the investigation of social housing may be indicative of the status of urban poverty. Earlier studies of urban poverty have focused separately on community development, political implications and geographical connections and lacked a systematic conceptual and theoretical framework integrating all three of these issues. Conceptually, this study aims to examine whether residents of social housing communities have experienced any injustices regarding the obtaining of physical resources within the city, or any unjust psychological perceptions. Guided by the “spatial justice theory”, this analysis empirically surveyed 660 residents of 13 social housing communities in Guangzhou in greater detail. Based on three major criteria extracted from the theory: territorial distributive justice, economic inequality and locational discrimination, this research has examined correspondingly three major issues of accessibility of facilities, job-housing relationship and neighbourhood integration. The major questions are: 1) can residents in social housing easily access public facilities? 2) Do they experience difficulties in job-housing connection after resettlement? 3) Do they experience social exclusion or marginalization? Data relating to the ease of accessing public facilities, the commuting time to work and the degree of social integration were collected by questionnaires, while the physical locations of social housing buildings and communities were obtained from map databases. These data are processed with the spatial analysis in ArcGIS and statistical tests in SPSS, and each of the three justice degrees of the social housing target groups is estimated. The results reveal that residents’ assessments of services provided by facilities depends largely on the distance to the facilities needed daily, as well as to the quality of basic education, the quality of basic healthcare and the price level of basic commercial goods. The spatial accessibility injustice appear to become more profound with unintegrated and large-size public services like shopping malls, parks and greens, and metro stations, in particular those in specific communities which are remotely located or have very short length of residence. Meanwhile, the injustice they are suffering was more likely related to the quality rather than the quantity of the service. To reduce the specific injustices that social housing residents are confronted with, more attentions should be given to the quality of services, particularly the basic healthcare and education, especially around Tianhe, Baiyun district and new projects. With regard to the connections between job and housing, a majority of residents has changed their workplaces around the relocated living area after resettlement and those residents remaining in their former workplaces would rather face the problem of distant employments. No significant evidence was found to indicate that current residents of social housing are suffering from injustice in relation to their current employment behaviour. As residents are mainly engaged in jobs in basic services with low-skill requirements, it would be very helpful to provide more industries involved in basic services, such as the catering industry, in these areas. Finally, social housing residents appear to be effectively integrated into the local environment. They have also developed a better network within the community, and those aged over age 40, less educated or have a low-income may have a strong dependence on it. The combining of theory results with feasible measurements has substantial implications for understanding the pattern of justice in space and for improving the accuracy of housing policy approaches. Detailed informative and measurement criteria are also beneficial for future research avenues.

The article is an original synthesis of accessibility and mobility modelling that is carried-out in the Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization, Polish Academy of Sciences (IGSO PAS). The paper takes into account the spatial context of industry development in Poland, with particular emphasis on the spatial dis- tribution of population, GDP and location of commercial companies. The potential accessibility in HGV trans- port, where attractiveness depends on both population and GDP is taken into consideration. For the empirical analysis the OGAM application was used. In the part of the paper devoted to mobility issues, a model uses the results of the distribution of traffic on the national and voivodeship road network and VISUM software. The original method compares the results of the gravity model for travel between commercial companies carried out by entrepreneurs (businessmen, sales representatives, etc.) with the real traffic distribution. The overestimation/underestimation of traffic with respect to the results of the General Traffic Survey in 2010 was shown. Both in the accessibility and mobility studies a matrix of travel time at the municipal level (2,321 units) was used. Speeds were calculated based on the IGSO PAS speed model. It was pointed out that the potential and gravity models are still not very popular methods of analysis of determinants of industrial de- velopment in Poland. They provide the opportunities for indicating potential locations for new investments in the context of both freight transport and business travel

In this thesis, concepts for developing Spatial Data Infrastructures with an emphasis on visualizing 3D landscape and city models in distributed environments are discussed. Spatial Data Infrastructures are important for public authorities in order to perform tasks on a daily basis, and serve as research topic in geo-informatics. Joint initiatives at national and international level exist for harmonizing procedures and technologies. Interoperability is an important aspect in this context - as enabling technology for sharing, distributing, and connecting geospatial data and services. The Open Geospatial Consortium is the main driver for developing international standards in this sector and includes government agencies, universities and private companies in a consensus process. 
\n3D city models are becoming increasingly popular not only in desktop Virtual Reality applications but also for being used in professional purposes by public authorities. Spatial Data Infrastructures focus so far on the storage and exchange of 3D building and elevation data. For efficient streaming and visualization of spatial 3D data in distributed network environments such as the internet, concepts from the area of real time 3D Computer Graphics must be applied and combined with Geographic Information Systems (GIS). For example, scene graph data structures are commonly used for creating complex and dynamic 3D environments for computer games and Virtual Reality applications, but have not been introduced in GIS so far. 
\nIn this thesis, several aspects of how to create interoperable and service-based environments for 3D spatial data are addressed. These aspects are covered by publications in journals and conference proceedings. The introductory chapter provides a logic succession from geometrical operations for processing raw data, to data integration patterns, to system designs of single components, to service interface descriptions and workflows, and finally to an architecture of a complete distributed service network.
\nDigital Elevation Models are very important in 3D geo-visualization systems. Data structures, methods and processes are described for making them available in service based infrastructures. A specific mesh reduction method is used for generating lower levels of detail from very large point data sets. An integration technique is presented that allows the combination with 2D GIS data such as roads and land use areas. This approach allows using another optimization technique that greatly improves the usability for immersive 3D applications such as pedestrian navigation: flattening road and water surfaces. It is a geometric operation, which uses data structures and algorithms found in numerical simulation software implementing Finite Element Methods. 
\n3D Routing is presented as a typical application scenario for detailed 3D city models. Specific problems such as bridges, overpasses and multilevel networks are addressed and possible solutions described. The integration of routing capabilities in service infrastructures can be accomplished with standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium. An additional service is described for creating 3D networks and for generating 3D routes on the fly. Visualization of indoor routes requires different representation techniques.
\nAs server interface for providing access to all 3D data, the Web 3D Service has been used and further developed. Integrating and handling scene graph data is described in order to create rich virtual environments. Coordinate transformations of scene graphs are described in detail, which is an important aspect for ensuring interoperability between systems using different spatial reference systems. The Web 3D Service plays a central part in nearly all experiments that have been carried out. It does not only provide the means for interactive web-visualizations, but also for performing further analyses, accessing detailed feature information, and for automatic content discovery.
\nOpenStreetMap and other worldwide available datasets are used for developing a complete architecture demonstrating the scalability of 3D Spatial Data Infrastructures. Its suitability for creating 3D city models is analyzed, according to requirements set by international standards. A full virtual globe system has been developed based on OpenStreetMap including data processing, database storage, web streaming and a visualization client.
\nResults are discussed and compared to similar approaches within geo-informatics research, clarifying in which application scenarios and under which requirements the approaches in this thesis can be applied.
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Land use characteristics and its spatial distribution of Songnen High Plain based on quantitative geography model

This Ph.D.-dissertation studies the locational policies agendas of four secondary capital cities, namely Bern, Ottawa, The Hague and Washington, DC. Secondary capital cities are defined as capitals that are not the primary economic city of their nation states. Economic globalization challenges the primacy of capital cities and it pressure secondary capital cities to enter a globalized and increasingly knowledge-intense interurban competition. Cities aim to enhance their economic competitiveness by identifying, developing, and exploiting the place-specific assets that are considered to be most competitive through the formulation of locational policies. This dissertation brings two core types of locational policies agendas to light. The first is geared towards the physical development of the city and the attraction of public funds. It can empirically be found in Ottawa and The Hague. The second locational policies agenda is geared towards maximizing tax revenues, and it is predominant in Bern and Washington, DC. The emergence of these two different locational policies agendas can be explained by four factors, namely, local tax autonomy, the development stage of the RIS, capital city specific constraints, and vertical institutional fragmentation in combination with the degree of local tax autonomy. The degree of local tax autonomy is the best predictor of locational policies as it sets up the structures under which cities can raise funds. Thus, institutions seem to matter when explaining the variance of urban policies. The findings show that cities face similar pressures due to economic globalization. However, their policy responses to cope with these pressures do not converge. Instead, they are diverse because they are mediated by place-based institutional constraints and opportunities. Cities can exert agency when they formulate innovation policies to alter economic institutional constraints. Secondary capital cities have some locational policy options at hand to assert their position in the globalized interurban competition. Furthermore, politics is a factor in its own right. Urban governance arrangements in secondary capital cities seem to be distinct from those in other types of cities. Secondary capital cities are government cities that lack an industrial tradition. In such a context, local governments take a leading role in urban governance arrangements and developers are the only important business actors that engage in the formulation of locational policies. Secondary capital cities cannot escape their destinies as government cities, but they can formulate a variety of locational policies in order to supplement their capital city function with an economically promising profile. This two-dimensional positioning strategy – as a capital city and as a business city – can be achieved by a careful and strategic crafting of innovation policies that try to activate knowledge circulation within their knowledge-intensive economies.

In 1895, the failure of Sino-Japanese prompted the trend of comprehensive and systematic study of western pattern in China. In urban planning and construction, urban reform movement sprang up slowly, which aimed at renovating and reconstructing the traditional cities into modern cities similar to the concessions. During the movement, Chinese traditional city initiated a process of modern urban planning for its modernization. Meanwhile, the traditional planning morphology and system started to disintegrate, on the contrary, western form and technology had become the paradigm. Therefore, the improvement of existing cities had become the prototype of urban planning of early modern China. Currently, researches of the movement mainly concentrate on large cities, concessions, railway hub cities and some special cities resembling those. However, the systematic research about the large number of traditional small and medium-sized cities is still blank, up to now. This paper takes the improvement constructions of small and medium-sized cities in Southern region of Jiangsu Province as the research object. First of all, the criteria of small and medium-sized cities are based on the administrative levels of general office and cities at the county level. Secondly, the suitability of taking the Southern Jiangsu as the research object. The southern area of Jiangsu province called Southern Jiangsu for short, was the most economically developed region in Jiangsu, and also one of the most economically developed and the highest urbanization regions in China. As the most developed agricultural areas in ancient China, Southern Jiangsu formed a large number of traditional small and medium-sized cities. In early modern times, with the help of the Shanghai economic radiation, geographical advantage and powerful economic foundation, Southern Jiangsu became an important birthplace of Chinese national industry. Furthermore, the strong business atmosphere promoted the widespread urban improvement practices, which were incomparable of other regions. Meanwhile, the demonstration of Shanghai, Zhenjiang, Suzhou and other port cities became the improvement pattern of small and medium-sized city in Southern Jiangsu. This paper analyzes the reform movement of the small and medium-sized cities in Southern Jiangsu (1895-1927), including the subjects, objects, laws, technologies and the influence factors of politic and society ,etc. At last, this paper reveals the formation mechanism and characteristics of urban improvement movement in early modern China. According to the paper, the improvement of small-medium city was a kind of gestation of the local city planning culture in early modern China，with a fusion of introduction and endophytism.

فاصلۀ بین محل کار و فراغت در زندگی شهری، یکی از مسائل مهم در برنامه‏ریزی شهری است و کاهش آن از طریق جلوگیری از گسترش افقی شهری و تحقق فرم کالبدی فشرده در قالب کاربری ترکیبی امکان‏پذیر است، که نتیجة آن کاهش طول سفرها ومصرف انرژی، سرانجام کاهش آلودگی هوا و محیط زیست است. بنابراین دسترسی مطلوب یک عامل ضروری برای تحقق توسعة پایدار محیط زیست شهری است. هدف این مطالعه سنجش شاخص دسترسی و شناسایی نقاط قابل دسترس نسبت به محیط مجاور در نواحی شهر مشهد است. روش کار برای دستیابی به این هدف، شاخص دسترسی با مدل گرانشی فرصتی هنسن (تعداد جمعیت (سرشماری 1385 و مسافت بین نواحی) است که در 40 ناحیة شهرداری مشهد با ابزارهای نرم افزاری Matlab 7، ArcGIS10 محاسبه شده است. میانگین ضریب شاخص دسترسی برابر عدد 5/727 می‏باشد که حدأکثر برابر عدد 1038 و با محدودة مرکزی شهر مشهد (پیرامون محدودة حرم مطهرحضرت رضا(ع)) منطبق می‏باشد. حدأقل ضریب دسترسی برابر عدد 320 محاسبه شده است که با محدوده های پیرامونی(حاشیه‏ای) کلان شهر مشهد منطبق است. این اعداد نشان می دهد که مشهد به لحاظ شاخص دسترسی به سه منطقه: 1- منطقه با دسترسی بالا (محدودة مرکزی شهر) 2- منطقه با دسترسی متوسط(محدودة میانی شهر) 3- منطقه با دسترسی پایین (محدودة حاشیه‏ای و بیرونی شهر) تقسیم شده است. همچنین نتیجة سنجش رابطه بین شاخص دسترسی و جمعیت در سطح نواحی شهرداری مشهد با نرم افزار SPSSنشان می‏دهد که این رابطه منفی و برابر r = - 0/32 و در سطح اطمینان 0/5 معنی‏دار می‏باشد؛ یعنی با افزایش ضریب دسترسی، جمعیت نواحی شهری کاهش می‌یابد. همچنین بیانگر این واقعیت است که مناطق پرجمعیت شهر که بیشتر شامل مناطق کم درآمد نیز می‏باشد، دارای ضریب دسترسی پایینی است. افزون بر این ضریب دسترسی با فاصله از مرکز شهر مشهد به سمت نواحی پیرامونی کاهش می‏یابد.

مطالعه مخاطرات طبیعی یکی از مهم‌ترین اصول اولیه برای توسعه شهرهای درحال‌توسعه و گسترش تأسیسات زیربنایی است. ارزیابی فعالیت‏های ژئودینامیکی با استفاده از داده‏های ریخت‏شناسی یکی از روش‏های مهم و کاربردی در این راستا تلقی می‏شوند. در این مقاله سعی شده با استفاده از داده‏های سنجش‌ازدور، مطالعات صحرایی نسبت به شناسایی چین‏های فعال در شهرستان یزد اقدام و برای اولین‏ بار چین‏های فعال منطقه شناسایی شوند. بررسی‏ها نشان می‏دهد در محدوده شرق تا شمال‏شرق این شهر باستانی تعداد حداقل 5 چین فعال وجود دارد که به‌عنوان مخاطرات جدی برای منطقه محسوب می‏شوند. مقایسه موقعیت این چین‏ها با فعالیت‏های لرزه، حاکی از انطباق برخی کانون‏های زمین‏لرزه‏ای در این منطقه است. بدیهی است عبور هرگونه تأسیسات و شریان‏های حیاتی ازجمله راه‏های مواصلاتی، خطوط گاز، آب و یا سایر زیرساخت‏های شهری در این منطقه نیازمند تمهیدات ویژه می‏باشد.

In an era of ‘community empowerment’ and the devolution of welfare responsibilities to local groups, it is important to understand what community comes to mean in everyday life. Through two growing projects in Glasgow, this thesis discusses such meanings in local processes of exclusion and urban land development, and uses the sites to explore too the politics of collective growing. To do so, I consider the meanings, tensions and contradictions that emerge between the practices of being communal and the naming of such as community. I draw on a multi-sited ethnography and in depth interviews to elucidate the emergence of that which comes to be called community as a situated, empirical phenomenon. As an overburdened concept, I suggest community is not necessarily the most helpful analytical term to describe the collective activity in both case studies. Instead, I argue for seeing community primarily as a frame that guides and makes sense of communal practices. Whilst some hope has been located in community gardens and similar urban interventions as potential sources of renewal and collective resistance to the harsher vagaries of neoliberal capitalism, this thesis argues that communal growing does not present a systematic alternative, although it does appropriate urban land in occasionally subversive ways. Communal growing does however offer insights into the complexities of creating places for autonomy and survival in austere conditions. I reflect on the selective reproduction of class and social exclusions in growing spaces, and the tentative production of a time and space outwith the logics of the capitalist city, and yet within its bounds. Ultimately this thesis argues that community is not an anodyne or empty concept, but rather a dynamic and symbolically important idea shaping local urban life.

Against the backdrop of rapid urbanization,homeplace-based communities accommodating rural migrants from the same origin areas have proliferated in China's metropolitan cities.This phenomenon has attracted a wide range of political concern and media attention.However,little scholarly attention has been devoted to such rural migrant enclaves from the perspective of the social space,and to what extent and in what way 'the power of place' imposes influences upon the migration process and the labor-market process of rural migrants remain poorly understood.Based on field study and qualitative method,this paper aims to probe into the evolution process,basic characteristics,formation mechanism,and spatiality of Hubei Village,a homeplace-based community located in the city of Guangzhou,in the context of rapid urbanization.Our findings reveal that Hubei Village in general has become specialized in economic structure,homogeneous in sub-ethnic composition,and diversified in social stratum since the advent of the reform and opening up,and that abundant production networks and recruitment channels embedded with native space connections engender this community an enclave of key social and cultural distinction from surrounding areas.Our results suggest that Hubei Village plays a key role in accumulating and retaining all kinds of sub-ethnic elements,e.g.capital,labor force,and identity.Specifically,Hubei Village provides a place for the circuit of Hubei migrants' economic capital,for upward mobility of hubei labor migrants,and for integration of Hubei migrants into the host society of detonation cities.Our results further indicate that Hubei Village is a product of interrelated and interwoven forces at varied geographical scales,including market,institutional,and regional-level factors on a macro scale,factors related to urban expansion and infrastructure development on a meso scale,and factors related to competitive edges of Hubei garment factories,entrepreneurial spirit of Hubei migrants,and active response of local community on a micro scale.Based on our empirical study,we make a conclusive remark that homeplace-based communities,as new urban social spaces facilitated by grass-root efforts,make great contributions to the integration of neo-migrants in China's metropolitan cities.Therefore,governments should be cautious to carry out the wholesale demolition of homeplace-based communities,and should reconsider existing redevelopment policies toward urbanized villages.

About the book: This collection offers a global perspective on the changing character of cities and the increasing importance that consumer culture plays in defining their symbolic economies. Increasingly, forms of spectacle have come to shape how cities are imagined and to influence their character and the practices through which we know them - from advertising and the selling of real estate, to youth cultural consumption practices and forms of entrepreneurship, to the regeneration of urban areas under the guise of the heritage industry and the development of a WiFi landscape. Using examples of cities such as New York, Sydney, Atlantic City, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Douala, Liverpool, San Juan, Berlin and Harbin this book illustrates how image and practice have become entangled in the performance of the symbolic economy. It also argues that it is not just how the urban present is being shaped in this way that is significant to the development of cities but also that a prominent feature of their development has been the spectacular imagining of the past as heritage and through regeneration. Yet the ghosts that this conjures up in practice offer us a possible form of political unsettlement and alternative ways of viewing cities that is only just beginning to be explored. Through this important collection by some of the leading analysts of consumption, cities and space Consuming the Entrepreneurial City offers a cutting edge analysis of the ways in which cities are developing and the implications this has for their future. It is essential reading for students of Urban Studies, Geography, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Heritage Studies and Anthropology.

Energy Conservation Strategy Research for Residential Building Refurbishment in Urban area of China

Planning with self‑organised initiatives

JTG Special Section on Accessibility and Socio-Economic Activities: Methodological and Empirical Aspects

3D city models are nowadays used in very different applications. Due to this, the commercial exchange and, thus, the demand for high quality data becomes more and more important. We describe a quality model that defines common parameters used for spatial quality measurement, especially when dealing with 3D city models. Therefore, we explore different representations of city models: the reality, the user's idea and the digital data set. A welldefined mathematical formalism which addresses the different quality parameters is presented. This formalism also helps to create algorithms for measurement and improvement of spatial data quality. The aim is to be able to define uniformed criteria which can be easily transformed into software. The implemented prototype serves as base for the evaluation in which we provide examples based on actual data sets using typical quality requirements.